Posts
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| Common Loon / Photo by Grayson Smith/USFWS |
- A genetic study of the Long-whiskered Owlet confirmed that it is most closely related to the Elf Owl, and that those two species are also related to the Collared Owlet, which may deserve its own genus.
- Red-winged Blackbird nestlings stop calling when they hear the calls of potential predators.
- CityLab has an article on what New York City's bird-safe building law might look like in practice.
- One of the more difficult ID issues on my local Christmas Bird Count will be how to separate Black-capped and Carolina Chickadees.
- Find a local Christmas Bird Count via Audubon's map.
- A community in Kerala is working to protect the hornbills that live there.
- A man who killed an endangered Whooping Crane at a fish farm in Louisiana did not receive a fine or jail time. Louisiana has the highest number of Whooping Crane shootings, and that particular crane was part of the first successful breeding pair in the non-migratory flock.
- Satellite imagery shows the loss and fragmentation of old-growth forest habitat that the Spotted Owl requires.
- Oregon is reviewing its protections for Marbled Murrelets, a seabird that nests in old-growth forests.
- A family in Georgia found an Eastern Screech-Owl in their Christmas tree. (How the owl got there and why it stayed there are unclear.)
- Biologists have banded 1,700 Atlantic Brant with transmitters and colored leg markers to study their migration routes and behavior on breeding and wintering grounds. Birders who find marked Brant should report them to the Bird Banding Laboratory.
- Avian Hybrids: The genomics of being a raptor
- Corvid Research: What is “intelligence”?
- 10,000 Birds: The Final Days of the Danube backwaters in Belgrade: Chinese Belt and Road Initiative is coming to Serbia
- The Rattling Crow: Loafing gulls
- The Prairie Ecologist: Why Telling Prairie Stories Matters
- MaghrebOrnitho: House Bunting nesting on the Mediterranean coast of Algeria
- Feathered Photography: A Bloody Barn Owl In Flight
- The US Fish and Wildlife Service is considering protecting the Bethany Beach Firefly and Gulf Coast Solitary Bee under the Endangered Species Actin response to a petition. Both are threatened by habitat loss and pesticide use.
- Male golden rocket frogs advertise their parenting skills via their calls during the breeding season.
- Generally livestock can be protected from wolves without killing them, but 26 wolves have been killed at a single ranch in Washington.
- This winter twice as many Monarchs are wintering in Pismo Beach as last year according to counts by the Xerces Society. This is good news, but their numbers will need to incease substantially to reach historical levels.
- White-tip sharks were reclassified as critically endangered, but nations around the Pacific still have not improved protections for them.
- The climate talks in Madrid were mostly a failure, but one positive development was that participants finally started talking about phasing out fossil fuels.
- Alaska, like many places, seems too dependent on oil production to give it up, even in places that climate change is destroying.
- Tongass National Forest contains the largest remaining temperate rainforest but is constantly under threat, mostly recently by regulatory changes proposed by the Trump administration.
- Eleven northeastern states and the District of Columbia have proposed a plan to reduce emissions from cars via a cap-and-trade program. Transportation has become the top source of carbon emissions for 10 of the 11 states as the use of coal for electricity generation has declined.
- The Dutch Supreme Court ordered the Netherlands to reduce carbon emissions by 25% from 1990 levels by the end of 2020. This upholds a court order from 2015 that set a 2020 deadline for emissions cuts.
- An accident at a fracking site in Ohio last year produced one of the largest recorded methane leaks in the U.S.
- A bill in the House Natural Resources Committee would reduce emissions from public lands by shifting to renewable energy generation instead of fossil fuel extraction.
- California's waters are acidifying rapidly, thanks to a combination of climate change and natural oscillations.
- Many places along the East Coast will see significant changes with rising sea levels; one of the vulnerable places is Cape Cod.
- A new climate change report by state climatologists shows that sea level rise will be much worse along the New Jersey coast than current policies envision.
